The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) once said ‘the composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community’. Vaughan Williams was part of a movement which was determined to capture the folk music of England before it was lost. Cecil Sharp is the name to take note of here. He feared that traditional songs and dances would die out if something wasn’t done before it was too late. So he and a number of Victorian collectors went out song- hunting in the countryside to save the musical heritage.
In some cases they even carried wind-up acoustic cylinder recorders with them (the very latest at that time), whilst others wrote down the musical notation. Unfortunately some of the songs were only partially remembered by the singers, whilst others turned out to be music hall rather than folk songs. The result, however was valuable: the songs revealing much about the life and attitudes of their day.
Sharp founded the English Folk Song & Dance Society and donated his London house as its headquarters and a home for the Cecil Sharp Memorial Library – a large archive he and others had collected. The house is host to folk dancing enthusiasts, one such, many years ago persuading me to join her on a festive evening – an experience I there and then decided never to repeat!
What has been called Elgar’s ‘Englishness’ is explicit in the music of Vaughan Williams but also the compositions of his friend Gustav Holst (1874-1934) , the two friends united in their appreciation of folk music. Although Holst is best known through his suite ‘The Planets’, his originality as a composer owes some of its inspiration to the movement for the preservation of indigenous music. The mercurial Percy Grainger(1882-1961) – he belongs to no known category, gathering ideas and inspiration from many countries – was another collector.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) arranged many folk songs and there are several recordings of these still available, Britten playing his Schubertian piano accompaniment and the songs sung by his partner, Peter Pears.
B.R….more next time
